The traditional rundown

The traditional rundown isn’t just a list; it’s the heartbeat of any news operation. It coordinates work within the newsroom among producers, writers, directors, and editors, ensuring everything runs smoothly during live broadcasts or recorded shows. 

Like most legacy workflows, traditional rundowns have their limitations. They are typically broadcast-centric, a blueprint for what will happen in a single show. This makes it challenging to adapt to today’s digital workflows. This limitation can hinder news organizations in an era where digital content consumption is skyrocketing.

A story-centric vision for newsrooms

Dalet Pyramid’s story-centric approach untethers content from specific output channels and modernizes news operations with several unified planning, production and distribution tools for both linear and digital teams. While enabling digital-first workflows is key to success today, we understand from our customers that this approach must still preserve the core functionality of traditional live show production. Our goal is to shepherd these transitions at your pace, modernizing both the user experience and backend operations for all workflows. By adopting a story-centric approach, news organizations can achieve greater flexibility and more efficient delivery to any endpoint such as TV, SVOD, Social Media and websites.

Previewed at IBC 2024 in Amsterdam, the new Pyramid rundown capabilities are tailored to address future challenges while preserving the essence of TV operations. It’s efficient, adaptable, and core to Dalet’s vision of media and news convergence, acting as the brain of TV news operations.

What was previewed at IBC 2024:

• Intuitiveness

Built to keep up with the rapid pace of today’s newsrooms, Dalet Pyramid Rundown is designed for the challenging demands of newsrooms while still providing an intuitive user experience. A fresh UI consistent and embedded within the Dalet Pyramid news solution, brings a new modern rundown management experience. Easily add packages from stories and preview content directly in your rundown without changing pages or applications. Built with ease and speed in mind, robust keyboard shortcuts allow you to build and edit your rundown fast with as few clicks as possible.

• Agility

A fully browser-based rundown application brings a new level of accessibility and agility to your newsroom operation. Whether deployed in the cloud, on-premises or hybrid, Dalet Pyramid Rundown is accessible from anywhere within your web browser. This allows the heartbeat of your operation to expand beyond your 4 walls with ease.

• Collaboration

Dalet Pyramid Rundown was built with collaboration at the core. Multiple people can build and edit the rundown simultaneously from their browsers with ease. Real-time co-authoring is another standout feature with simultaneous script editing presented in an intuitive and familiar online shared document style. Beyond collaborating within your team, Dalet Pyramid Rundown is connected to your stories and enables collaboration across teams.

• Story Connectivity

Being fully integrated within the story-centric Dalet Pyramid solution means you can now bring story-centric workflows to your rundowns. Going from digital to linear or the other way around happens effortlessly. Stories are available in the rundown and the rundown is available in your story planning tool. By transitioning to a story-centric workflow you can break news first on any platform and ensure you are avoiding duplicate work and efforts.

• Future-proofing your newsroom

In an industry that’s constantly evolving, future-proofing your newsroom is essential. Changing workflows that are at the core of your operation is difficult, but transitioning to a modern rundown solution can help companies prepare for the full story-centric workflow of the future. Dalet Pyramid’s modern design and award-winning features ensure that your news operation remains competitive. By adopting Dalet Pyramid Rundown, you can stay ahead of the curve to meet the demands of today’s digital audience.

Whether your operation is linear first or digital first, rundown-based or story centric, Dalet Pyramid offers a solution that enhances efficiency, improves collaboration, and future-proofs your news operation. Explore the possibilities and see how Dalet can transform your newsroom today.

For more information and to get started with Dalet Pyramid, visit www.dalet.com to discover how we can help you achieve your news production goals.

The post Rundown Redefined: Dalet’s Story-Centric News Production Approach  appeared first on Dalet.

However, these product launches at IBC2023 weren’t just about the new technology – it was bigger than that. Much bigger. It’s about creating a strong ecosystem and the value it brings to our customers.

From elastic ingest in the cloud to browser-based editing, digital-native news production, automated supply chains, multiplatform distribution, and archives management and monetization, Dalet is a cloud-native, subscription-based media solutions company uniquely positioned to help media-rich organizations overcome the constantly evolving production and distribution challenges. These challenges are particularly acute as we ramp up for a year of major events and continuous industry transformation through streaming and multi-faceted content offerings.

The BIG trends

It’s clear from the conversations around the show floor and presentations that two key macrotrends are impacting M&E. First and foremost, the global economic conditions. Consecutive months of rising inflation and interest rates are driving costs up, putting enormous pressure on operational budgets, which in turn are impacting the entire media supply chain. Second, the promise and potential (pitfalls) of AI. A gold rush of sorts, AI has exploded onto the scene with opposing opinions on its ability to sink or save M&E. While the hype is hard to ignore, what matters more than ever is solving real pain points and providing new ways of operating that deliver business value.

As broadcasters, content owners, and providers struggle to meet viewer demand, Dalet solutions optimize operations and enable you to better manage, distribute, and fully monetize your content on any platform with ease, speed, scale, visibility, and much more cost efficiency.

And as for AI, it has been a part of Dalet solutions for the last five years. The Dalet Media Cortex AI service platform is a mature, proven assistant that brings AI-infused tools and workflows for key use cases – automatic tagging, automation of captioning, and editing workflows – to make media professionals more productive and free up time for creative work. No fad or fly-by-the-night AI gimmick. It’s tried and tested. It’s a tool that provides real efficiency gains, and because we have invested in its development, it will be there for you in the long run.

Dalet is made for this moment

While the two overarching trends this year at IBC are wildly different, they do connect over operational efficiency. As the dust settles, it is operational efficiency that will be the hallmark that defines customer success. The ability to lower costs and repurpose or deliver content with the widest breadth and depth efficiently is essential. You need a platform that dynamically scales based on needs and tools that are trusted technology, not fads.

Our flagship solution, Dalex Flex, is at the center of the media workflow providing an ecosystem of connected apps that offer customers a collaborative environment to streamline their operation in a way that optimizes cost savings while offering the agility to launch new content and business initiatives.

Our suite of applications for news production and distribution, Dalet Pyramid, provides digital-native storytelling capabilities within a collaborative environment to plan, craft, and share stories from anywhere in real-time.

Talk to us about how we can make your operation more efficient and enable you to deliver more with ease. Our promise to you is a greater return on investment with agility to embrace new business models that enable you to thrive today and into the future!

Missed us at the IBC Show?

The post Dalet is Made for this Moment – TBT IBC2023 appeared first on Dalet.

As one of the big buzzwords in recent years, it still seems necessary to shortly explain what “SaaS” really means. “SaaS” stands for “Software as a Service”. On the one hand side, it is a method of software delivery in which software is accessed online (often directly via a natural web interface) rather than installed on computers or accessed via VPN from company’s internal networks. On the other hand, it is a contractual model. Simply put, customers subscribe to the software instead of purchasing the license. Think of it like a subscription to Netflix instead of buying a DVD – or rather, all DVDs of all movies on Netflix. But what exactly are the benefits of SaaS?

When properly executed, moving towards SaaS is beneficial for both the solution provider and the respective end-customers. The media technology industry has been slower than others in adopting Cloud computing and SaaS-first solutions, but the pace is quickly accelerating. Dalet has been working on its Cloud strategy over the last ten years and is currently transforming all of its offerings to be available in a SaaS model.

Here is why you should “Go SaaS”, enabling continuous innovation and agility for your business.

Why – Benefits of SaaS for end customers

• Access to continuous innovation: Customers get immediate access to product improvements in the cloud without the upgrading and updating hassle of the past. Innovation cycles are significantly reduced, often to bi-weekly releases instead of 1-3 releases per year.

• Reduced administration time and costs: SaaS providers typically deal with infrastructure and management allowing their customers to focus on their core business. They control the security with dedicated professionals. The cloud offers endless scalability, which is key in a data-driven world. And reliability is proven to be higher with the availability of much better disaster recovery.

• Lower upfront costs: Without the initial license fee, lower upfront costs and – with that – a lower commitment is required to become a customer. While this is a clear benefit of SaaS, introduction of new software is still a significant commitment of time and money, and no company invests in the introduction, training and integration of Enterprise Software with the intent to churn after a few years. However, as the world turns faster and faster and decision periods are getting shorter, the hurdle of switching is going down with a subscription model.

• Higher cost predictability: While larger upgrades must be individually purchased for most perpetually licensed software (customers are only entitled to bug fixes and small updates), SaaS includes all updates and upgrades in one simple subscription fee.

• Most importantly – higher customer-centricity of the provider: As customers have not purchased the software but have a subscription with lower commitment, SaaS providers have to care more about customer satisfaction to avoid churn, leading to a more customer-centric business focus.

Why – Benefits of SaaS for technology providers

• Better standardization and integration: In the cloud, there are not hundreds of systems running with dozens of versions of operating systems. Instead, more standardization of hardware and software leads to fewer issues. In addition, integration with other software is much easier through standardized interfaces.
• Faster, customer-oriented development and deployment: Through measurement of how the product is being used, SaaS providers better understand pain points and can address those immediately – from slight changes in the UX to the addition of new functionalities. Efficiency is a major benefit of SaaS and developments can be made available to customers without time-consuming implementation efforts.
• More agility: SaaS uses much more adaptable technology stacks which ultimately help to deliver faster innovations. This allows focusing on more value-adding development for customers instead of testing and bug-fixing.

Companies offering their customers all the benefits of SaaS create a win-win solution that can be hard to beat. However, this transition is not just a change in the revenue or deployment model but a change in how the business needs to be run across the organization. This includes all departments, for example:

• Product development/Engineering: Embrace continuous customer-oriented development instead of major product-oriented upgrades

• Product management: Simplify the product with a focus on the user

• Customer service/success: Be proactive and ensure customer success based on actual data instead of providing only reactive support

• Sales: Focus on a long-term relationship instead of one-time “take the money and run” sales behavior

• Professional services: Provide fast time to value

• Finance: Focus on new customer-centric metrics (churn, satisfaction, usage) instead of billings or revenue only

In summary, successful SaaS providers focus relentlessly on being simpler to do business with, providing faster time-to-value and acting more as customer-centric partners to be successful. The team at Dalet is transforming not only their products, but also their internal processes and talent to deliver that promise.

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